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I don’t think it’s inverted. Satellite cameras (or, say, mars rover cameras) don’t always use visible light; they often take pictures of non-visible spectra (for example, infrared, to see heat patterns), which are then mapped to visible colors so humans can view the non-visible spectra imagery.

Note that even after inverting the image, the colors don’t really quite line up with the presumably non-inverted imagery surrounding the “inverted” patch — the farms are much brighter. Inverting it just somehow makes it look somewhat more natural-looking to some people.

In the section in question, note that the rocky areas have much more color variation than in the other sections. My guess is that this image was looking for mineral deposits.

I suggested a link for a section of Korea a couple days ago. (Hasn’t shown up yet, but I’ll give it time.) If you zoom out and look to the south, you can see one section shows up at full detail, and in the south-eastern corner of this section, if you zoom in all the way, you’ll see a portion of the wall seperating North and South Korea. Not quite the Killing Fields, but close. Hard to tell without the map-detail, though.

I concede – not long after posting this suggestion, I realised that the shadows of buildings in the image were darker than surroundings, so it’s not inverted. On the other hand, it’s seriously screwed up.

I do think it’s visible light, but I suspect part of the image data has gone missing. If you take the image into photoshop, convert it to LAB colour and start mucking about with the ‘b’ channel, you see the image really start to take shape.

LAB colour is the most efficient for jpeg compression and the a and b channels get the stuffing knocked out of them in heavy compression, so I reckon a missing or corrupted b channel is the most likely suspect.

Taken in winter and appears to be ice. At the right angle you can sort of see clouds reflected in the ice. This is probably the same as other places that have shots of water where things are reflected back to the camera.

Damn, I knew somebody would call me out on that Killing Fields reference. Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that’s the wall there. Mine fields are what I was thinking of, though I don’t know if you could identify a mine field from this distance.

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